Wild Stone Heart

Book excerpt: In a seemingly ordinary field on Sharon Butala's land on the prairies of Canada lie the secrets of the past. When she and her husband, Peter, decide to let the field return to its natural state, the wonders of the prairie landscape begin to reveal themselves to her. Over a twenty-year period, as she walked this field, she tried to understand what lessons could be leanred from its mysterious markings, its wildlife, grasses and plants, its massive rocks and boulders deposited there as glaciers retreated. The field became a tabula rasa on which she could project her own dreams and imagining about the landscape that has informed her writing and inspired life. Butala's keen intelligence ranges over prehistory, natural history, Amerindian custom, the farming and ranching ways of life, and the politics of the West today. Wild Stone Heart captures brilliantly the collision of past and present and one woman's search for her own place in the world.